Monthly Archives: October 2015

With the Andy Warhol projects completed at the beginning of last week, the Halloween celebrations could begin! We started off with some coloring pages to work on coloring neatly inside the lines before moving on to drawing our own Halloween landscapes. They ended up looking fantastic! With the liberty to draw pumpkins, ghosts, trees, and witches wherever they wanted, each drawing was came out as a unique creation.

This week, I brought in a box of “worms” (colored pasta) and some toys for everyone to play with. We also decorated Halloween bags and made pop-up haunted house cards. Everyone used their landscape practice to add in interesting little details to their houses. Ghosts peeked through windows and pumpkins sat in the yard. They were all very cute, though I think the most exciting thing for the class was that when the card was propped up, the house would pop out to stand on its own.

The first column has Addison, Gabi, and Grant, and the second column as Braden, Aarush, and Waylen.

Last week, the 1st Grade class finished up their still life drawings. As students finished up their projects, I asked them to talk to each other about things they could improve on or things that were different between the drawings. I was impressed to hear a discussion over how big or small the shadows should be based on the size of the sphere or the way the sun was sitting in the sky. Everyone was allowed the chance to make any changes they wanted after the discussion, and then the drawings were put up on display. They are now a bright and colorful addition to our hallway!

This week, we moved on to our lessons on portraits and self-portraits. That included learning about the tiny details of the face, like how eyes are more of a football shape than an oval, and how all people, even boys, have eyelashes and lips. That last discovery was met with a lot of giggling, but eventually we all got our details in. And then I gave them all a surprise! These were going to be Halloween Self-Portraits. Friday was spent dressing up the portraits in costumes. It was a fun start to the Halloween weekend, and a great way to let the class use their observation skills.

On top is Ryan’s portrait. On the middle row, starting from the left, we have Braden, Zoe, Lillian, and Jonathan. On the bottom row, we have Cormac, Bladen, Russell, and Kate.

Isabella and Ethan aren’t quite done yet, but here are their in-progress works. Ethan was Indiana Jones and Isabella was a Zombie.

The Kindergarten class has been exceptionally busy these past two weeks. We started by finishing our in-the-round sculptures. Eagles seemed to be the most popular topic, though we had a wide variety of other creations as well. Our second in-the-round sculpture set was in the spirit of Halloween. We made spooky trees out of paper bags and painted coffee filters. They’re all quite unique! Some had many branches, some had few. The class described some trees as being older than others based on how droopy the branches had become.

With a completed spooky forest, we moved on to our lessons on Native American Totem Poles. The next project would involve building a classroom totem pole made up of each student’s individual totem. We started by drawing out what animal we would use as a totem, and then sharing that drawing with the class. However, by the following day, most students had changed their minds, so the totems rarely match the drawings. That’s okay though. Great ideas often need revision as time goes by!

The still life drawings were completed at the beginning of last week, bringing us to the start of the next project. The Positive and Negative Space project for 2nd and 3rd grade involves cutting up old magazines into colored strips. Those strips will then be glued down to create the positive space for the project. It’s an extensive process to get enough paper for the project, so the whole week was spent working on getting a good collection built up.

The 4th Grade class both started and completed their first sculpture project over the past two weeks. Inspired by Alberto Giacometti, we built wire sculptures of tall, slender forms and wrapped them in aluminum foil to give them more body. Once they were built, we had a discussion over how artists named their artwork, and how it’s important to name a work in a way that represents what you should see or think about when you view it. With that in mind, everyone gave their sculptures a name and set them up on a table for display.

With all but one of the Reverse Value Drawings completed, the 5th Grade Class moved on to their Positive and Negative Space Project. After picking out a reference image, everyone started their new drawings. The subjects are Elton John, a ram, a goat, a wolf, a dog, and a puppy. After drawing an outline, the background has to be filled with at least six different patterns that will help divide the space, either into details or just into randomized sections. After that, the subject of the drawing has to be cut out, flipped over, and decorated in the same way. That creates two different positive spaces: one from the foreground and one from the background. One of the most interesting parts about this project is seeing how different the patterns are for each person. Creativity is an amazing thing.

These past two weeks were filled with crafts for the Preppers as we got ready to celebrate Halloween. We made monster faces out of green and black paper, pumpkin window stickers out of tissue paper and contact sheets, and watercolor paintings with brushes and straws.

In addition to all that, the Preppers got to play in the Halloween sensory box. Made of rice, cups, and toys, the box had quite the line of little friends wanting to go play.

And finally, we decorated Halloween treat bags with stamps! Stamps were the most popular activity, so we spent a couple of days with those as everyone figured out that the best way to use them was to press for three seconds and then lift up the stamp. “One, two, three, UP!” was the classroom chant for a while.